Just a theory, but given how much fracturing/variation of music tastes people have developed in the last 50 years, I'm not sure there's enough of an audience for any of those mega bands to get to that level anymore (except for a few pop artists here and there).
I also suspect discoverability is a lot more of a challenge now too given the saturation of content out there and the small market. I've discovered some excellent bands (for my musical tastes of course, which are Rock & Metal) that I can't believe aren't bigger. These Four Walls and Thousand Needles In Red come to mind. Like Thieves is pretty decent too, nice music to put in the background on a drive through the canyon or while working. All of those bands are on Bandcamp btw.
Disclaimer; this is clearly going to be about personal tastes.
However, it has to be argued: Taylor hardly breaks through genres to create entirely new ones, as Brian Wilson or Sly Stone did.
Taylor is a ‘safe’ songwriter whose market is intolerant of exceeding the limits of her chosen genre - Brian and Sly, however, can be perceived as being far more progressive as artists, willing not only to break the conformity of their extant music market, but to excel at creating entire new genres on their own.
What is Taylors “Pet Songs”?
Taylor Swift is the least likely of the three to have created her own genre of music outside market expectations. While she’s undeniably innovative, her contributions largely refine and personalize existing genres (country, pop, indie-folk) rather than inventing entirely new ones.
Both Wilson and Stone created groundbreaking sounds—Wilson with orchestral pop and Stone with funk/psychedelic soul—that were more radical departures from their era’s commercial norms.
Between Wilson and Stone, Stone’s creation of funk and his influence across multiple genres (funk, soul, rock, hip-hop) arguably had a broader impact, but Swift’s work, while transformative, operates more within established frameworks.
We won't really see until in retrospect. Something that today is "some little thing that one band does" may turn into something that gets seen as a whole genre tomorrow.
Case in point: I recently listened to "Tracks and Traces", a compilation of things Brian Eno did with Harmonia in 1976.
It IS "post-rock". You could slip some tracks from that album onto Mogwai's albums from the 2000s, and you would hardly notice something is amiss. And you know it wasn't a direct influence, because the recordings were only released 30 years later.
She certainly makes a lot of money. Brian Wilson was a writers writer. Taylor Swift isn't writing anything interesting that makes any song writer go "holy shit, that's genius". Music theorists don't study her music, she's not doing anything groundbreaking or new. She writes catchy songs for sure, but a lot of people do that.
SOPHIE was definitely in the running for being another Brian Wilson type. Her immense creativity was best when channeled through others, just like Brian's.
She enjoyed some widespread success during her short life, but since her death, the style of music she helped pioneer has exploded in popularity. The extremely popular "brat" album from last year contained both explicit celebration of her name and homage to her style.
But she's dead now. Her music still inspires me.
He's dead now, too. His music will continue to inspire me.
I think it'll be someone pushing the boundaries of hip hop/rap/etc., it feels like there's still a lot more experimentation and unexplored stuff that can happen there. And most of the people on HN probably won't really appreciate it much, just like the general population didn't quite fully appreciate Brian Wilson's genius back when he was doing his best work.
I'm not super close to that genre so I wouldn't dare hazard a guess who that might be.
I think Ben Folds is underrated for what he's produced. I think people who listened to him in college write him off as being frat-rock but his stuff is actually super interesting, the more you dig.
Ben probably wouldn't be offended by that. He described Ben Folds Five as "punk rock for sissies". Further he said that he was always compared to Billy Joel, but hadn't heard him until he was much older, he always cited Elton John as an influence.
Feh, more music about middle class white boy pain. I like his older stuff, but producers with computers fix all his shitty tracks these days.
Seriously though, it's often fraught with peril to try to compare two artists directly, especially across time, styles, and genres. For me, I just try to weigh how much enjoyment their respective catalogs have given me, and I've enjoyed the hell out of both Ben Folds and Beach Boys records. It's all good.
Ben is eminently and deeply talented, but it's just a different aesthetic that is mostly very literal and conventional. Brian Wilson's songwriting and production technique was a one-of-a-kind imprint.
To me Wilson and Clapton are in the same league mainly due to rather unpalatable personalities, Wilson insisting on breaking the boycott of an apartheid state and Clapton throwing racist tantrums and profiting off a tragedy in his family.
+1 - when I read GP's comment, and thought: "who composes music that it sounds like to be alive right now?", Burial was my first thought.
Maybe this opinion is a little dated - Burial started a couple of decades ago now - I'm sure there's someone smart and younger capturing the sonics of our current moment accurately. But Burial is a truly great composer.
I really despise the (unintentional, totally forgivable) YouTube-comment-vibe of "When these giants pass away who replaces them? Who are the Brian Wilsons of today?" - it's very "Like this comment if you like REAL music, not [young pop star]."
It takes decades and decades to understand who captured a time period accurately, and whose work anticipated and influenced the art that was to come. Burial is probably the wrong answer!
It takes so much time for an artist to become revered as a "giant". It requires deep historical understanding and deep critique. There is plenty of very beautiful music being made. Naturally none of it sounds like Brian Wilson's - it isn't Brian Wilson's.
I don't think anyone wants to see Burial inducted into the "Rock n Roll Hall of Fame" at this time, or playing the Sunday Afternoon Legends slot at Glastonbury. Ditto for (most of) the other names mentioned in response to GP.
Innovative and masterful craft rarely makes itself immediately apparent to its audience - it's not an instant-gratification commodity - the audience must also work to reveal it. Takes time!
Yeah, I didn't mean to turn the thread into a measuring contest. When people come and go I think of a forest in constant renewal. Things die and they're replaced by new growth. When a visionary like Brian Wilson dies where is the renewal? It only feels like loss and I was trying to articulate that.
One person who comes to my mind who is a) arguably a creative boundary-breaking genius and b) has some degree of success within mainstream pop is Rosalía. But she's more of an "artist's artist". A lot of modern pop icons cite her as an influence, but she's not nearly as well known as those are.
